This disclosure relates generally to the field of ITIL®-based (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs). (ITIL is a registered trademark of The Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury acting through The Office of Government Commerce and Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, United Kingdom.) ITIL-based CMDBs are emerging as a prominent technology for Enterprise Management Software. In enterprise systems management, data about IT business entities such as servers and applications are generally spread across several repositories, known as Management Data Repositories (MDRs). This data is made available to software applications through various standard and non-standard mechanisms such as Structured Query Language (SQL) and/or other proprietary programming interfaces.
The usefulness of these CMDBs is dependent on the quality, reliability and security of the data stored in them. A CMDB often contains data about managed resources known as Configuration Items (CIs). ITIL version 3 defines a CI as: “Any Component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service. Information about each CI is recorded in a Configuration Record within the Configuration Management System and is maintained throughout its Lifecycle by Configuration Management. CIs are under the control of Change Management. CIs typically include IT Services, hardware, software, buildings, people, and formal documentation such as Process documentation and [Service Level Agreements].”
The CMDB serves as a point of integration between various IT management processes (See FIG. 1). Data federation is the combining of data from various data sources into one single virtual data source or data service. The data can then be accessed, managed and viewed as if it were part of a single system. Data from multiple sources often needs to be managed directly or by reference in commercial CMDBs. Thus, there was a need to create a standard for federating the data from various MDRs and/or CMDBs into a single view that appears seamless and integrated to the end-user. This standard, known as the CMDB Federation, or CMDBf, Standard was recently adopted by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). A copy of the CMDBf 1.0.0 Specification (DMTF Document Number: DSP0252) is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Some of the goals of CMDBf include: enabling a variety of data consumers to access a federation of management data through a standard access interface; enabling a variety of data providers to participate in a federation of management data through a standard provider interface; and providing an approach for reconciling and combining different information about the same resources.
At a high level, the CMDBf Standard defines the following features: a Web Services Query Interface that is intended for querying Configuration Items (CIs) distributed across a set of Federated MDRs; a Data Model that defines containers for Federated CI's (items in this data model are organized into simple flat record structures); a MDR Web-Services Query Interface for plugging MDRs into the Federated CMDB; Push-Mode and Pull-Mode alternative architectures for MDR Federation; and a Registration Web Services Interface for Push-Mode Federation.
However, a real-world implementation of CMDBf will need to have a number of features implemented that are not directly addressed by the CMDBf Standard. These features include: management of the MDR endpoints using a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry; querying of the MDR Data Models; and definition and management of mappings from MDR Data Models to CMDB Data Models. This disclosure presents solutions to these problems, along with the ability to bring CIs that are stored in MDRs under the management of a federating CMDB.